Psychics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

"it's like learning that the second richest person in the world is this GameStop employee named Greg" hits a little different in 2021

Me: a engineering student with dyslexia, stoked to see John oliver talk about physics...

My cousin used to believe in psychics. Till something happened to a friend of hers. Her friend’s teenage daughter walked out on her after a fight, and went missing. Mom went to a psychic, who told her the kid was dead in a ditch somewhere. Poor woman nearly killed herself from guilt and grief. The daughter came home next day, alive and well. She was just hiding out with some friends of hers. Not harmless!!!

Ha, I was 18 and a family friend asked if I'd play a psychic for an end of the school year school carnival. It was ridiculous how much people believed I was real. I wrote a bunch of words on little slips of paper and would have the person pull a couple from a bag then work those into my "reading". A bleached blonde but very tan wealthy looking girl came to my table and I told her I saw her on a boat, and in the sunshine. She was shocked because she had a vacation on the river planned. Oh really? Wealthy girl has access to a boat? gasp Who could imagine that to be the case?!

So does a "medium" turn into a "well-done" when they're grilled on TV?

If my dad tries to communicate with me through someone like Teresa Caputo, I will never speak to him again for the rest of my afterlife.

i'm glad he mentioned Amanda Berry. her mom died thinking she was dead, too, since Amanda was in captivity for a literal decade. it's extremely sad and sylvia brown should have been held responsible.

The irony of John Oliver being a psychic about Game Stop stock during a segment disproving psychics. What an amazing reality

John Oliver's commitment to constantly naming and shaming abusers makes me inordinately happy.

I remember driving with my mom, and we past by a psychic office that said out of business, my mom said bet she didn’t see that coming.

I went to a group reading once. When she went through her cold reading with me she didn't get anything correct - wrong letters (and I've lost quite a few people), no chest pains... She finally announced to the room that I was blocking her and moved on. The rest of the room fell hook line and sinker. Later my boyfriend overheard a conversation between people raving about her "powers" but also mentioned there was a 'difficult person' in the audience. I find that hysterical, if she had gotten ANYTHING correct I would've gone with it - but she didn't.

I'm a 21 year old out on a Friday night and I'm thinking I'll just check this out for 2 minutes while I wait to get into the club. I'm in the club now and still listening to the whole damn thing. Please keep doing this Mr. Oliver.

That "Game Stop" joke aged like a fine wine...

At 15 I thought I was having psychic dreams. I would dream something and find out later that day it actually happened. I was falling asleep to music on the radio, and it turned out the news came on about an hour before I woke up.

I have a deep hatred of psychics after a personal experience with one. When I was 3 years-old, my mom passed away suddenly from a bad seizure; she had epilepsy and had stopped taking her medications because she discovered that she was pregnant with my little brother/sister. She was only 26. My grandmother, naturally, was absolutely sick with grief. This was in 1988 and there was a very popular psychic fraudster at the time named George Anderson; he would write books and give lectures and of course, do “private readings” for an astronomical fee. My grandmother reached out to him and he agreed to see her. She was barely able to function or get out of bed at the time, so the family figured, “It couldn’t hurt. If it makes her feel better.” My family does not have a lot of money; we wouldn’t even qualify as middle class. Even so, my grandmother booked a flight to New York City, made reservations at a hotel and paid the exorbitant fee for this quack’s time. I was too little to accompany her but the session was tape recorded and I listened to it years later when I was older. Predictably, the session was nothing more than a bunch of vague generalizations and sappy, asinine messages. “She’s telling me that she died unexpectedly” (this could easily be gathered, here was an elderly woman seeking to connect with her deceased daughter; parents usually outlive their children so obviously something unexpected happened). “She says to tell you she is fine and loves you very much” (typical of every psychic). He would ask leading questions and then come to conclusions based on information he had gathered by asking said questions. He didn’t say one thing that was unique or something only my mother would have mentioned, like, oh, I dunno, her 3 year-old daughter? Her fiancé, my stepfather, who she was planning a wedding with? It was so absurd. It made me angry he took advantage of a grieving mother to make a fortune off of, how many others has he done this to? I believe in an afterlife, I do not believe in psychics. They may seem harmless to some, but they are taking advantage of people’s pain and misery

My niece was amazed at a reading she payed well for. She was adamant that this woman told her things she could not have possibly known. Until I asked her if she had mentioned any of them on line. She had mentioned every one of these revelations on one platform or another. Psychics have a whole new way of reading your future since the advent of the internet.

The funniest of debunk of all time....a psychic told Houdini that she was talking to his mom....his response, "I didn't know you were bilingual"....she said "i'm not"....his response, "thats funny because my mom didn't speak a word of English"

“Yup, that boy is indeed in the opposite of heaven: he’s in a Denny’s” I died man

I'm 3 years late and probably no one will see this but I went to their free psychic website that would be "exactly as accurate as any psychic reading that you would pay money for" and the first video I got after clicking on the psychic reading button was "Does the mid-sized Korean fishing city of Gunsan have any significance to you?" I'm an American expat living in Korea and actually lived there for 6 months! It's an insignificant place even in Korea and when I mention having lived in Gunsan (now having moved to a much bigger city), Koreans are always flabbergasted how I ever ended up there. The chances are hilarious and certainly more accurate than what I would get from a paid reading!

I am disappointed James Randi (who made an entire career over having so-called psychics prove their abilities) wasn't mentioned. He had a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who could prove that their 'abilities' were real and not just due to probability. No one ever claimed it.